So I'm the "Bunner" in DVD CCA vs Bunner. If you could look in my out-box today, here's what you'd see:
Friends and family,
My fifteen minutes of fame are over. The DVD CCA is dropping their case against me. For those that don't remember, I was sued in late 1999 for posting the source code to a software DVD player on my web site. The plaintifs included Sony, MGM, Panasonic, Microsoft, Warner-Brothers, and most other corporations in either media or electronics.
Today, they gave up. They've withdrawn the case without prejudice.
Reading between the lines that means that they finally realized they were going to lose and that even if they won, the "secrets" of playing a DVD have been pretty well documented for the public.
To celebrate the occassion, I've asked my lawyers to file a counter-suit alleging emotional anguish and seeking damages of one hundred billion trillion dollars.
-- Andrew
IntelliJ Features... Positively Ill.
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Java IDEs?
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· Score: 2
I've used JBuilder, JDeveloper, Together and taken a keen look at Java modules for Emacs... IntelliJ is miles ahead of these and by far the best IDE I've ever seen in my career.
Ctrl-Q puts the javadocs for method at the cursor in a little tool-tip pop-up
Alt-F7 finds all the callers of a method, implementors of an interface, descendants of a class, users of a class, reads of a variable or writes of a variable depending on the context and what you select.
Shift-F6 allows you to rename a variable, method or class and have ALL references to it throughout your entire project be updated.
The auto-complete feature is also the best I've seen. I start typing a variable name and then just hit Ctrl-Space and it will complete it for me, giving me a choice if there's more than one variable name with that prefix defined in the current scope. This works with methods and classes as well.
When I type a class name that hasn't been imported into the current file, IntelliJ underlines it in red and gives me the option to automatically add it to the imports by hitting Alt-Enter.
The "live templates" feature is incredible. I have mine set up so that when I type "log" and then hit tab, it prints...
getLog().debug("currentMethod: ")
...and puts the cursor just after the colon. The kicker is that it can figure out the current class and method and include it in my live template.
It's integrated with Ant and CVS. It's got a great debugger. It's lightning fast compared to the hog that is JBuilder.
If you program in Java, try this IDE. You will never go back.
I saw Down To Earth on Thursday at a Mountain View, CA theater... the version of the film that I saw looked like it was cobbled together from the clips that landed on the editing room floor.
In about 1/2 the scenes, you could see microphones dangling above the actors heads! Sometimes they were so obvious that I worried the actors were going to actually get hit by one of these dangling mics.
At first I thought it was intentional and that the microphone "gag" was going to be used somehow in the script... um, no. It was just a goof-up that lasted the entire movie.
My pet peeve.
Other than that, I enjoyed it:)
Re:Developers will hit the wall sooner or later
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Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 2
I doubt it. The tools they use to create the scenes will get more and more sophisticated. They might use fractal algorithms to generate super-fine detail in trees, landscapes, water, fog, etc. The point is, they won't be hand-placing every polygon--the same way you don't hand color-every pixel in any other form of computer art.
There will continue to be applications that push the limits of this and many subsequent 3D accelerators. Trust me.
Silicon Valley culture?? I've lived in Sunnyvale, Fremont and now San Francisco. The entire Penninsula from San Jose up towards Daly City is a cultural wasteland.
There's a lot of ethnicities mixed in and around that area, but they're all focused on making the big bucks.
Performing arts is limited to huge concerts at the Shoreline.
I haven't eaten at any restaurant in the Valley with decent food, service and ambiance with the exception of a few in downtown Palo Alto. And the restaurants in downtown Palo Alto are populated almost universally by status-/money-grubbing social climbers.
Most people work so hard and long they have little time to appreciate or contribute anything that I would call "culture". And when the dot-com'ers take a day off, they talk about work.
I work at a company called Woosh! and the only reason I tolerate Sunnyvale is because our CEO explicitly rejects the money-grubbers and those that are "cultural tofu". So we've got a spicy good mix at our office. That's the exception rather than the rule.
Now, if you don't mind, I need to go comute fourty miles. -Phbbt!-
All the filings relevant to my case are on http://www.eff.org. Press coverate was really good early on, but the California case has really been overshadowed by the 2600 case.
There's an article on my case on pg 96 of last month's Wired (the one with the cute asian chick on the cover).
The reason the 2600 case has gotten more coverage is because, frankly, it's more interesting. For the DVD CCA to sue people all over the world under California trade secret law is pretty ridiculous. Not only that, but they're completely in the wrong. The consensus within the community is and has always been that decss was not "illegally" reverse-engineered.
With the 2600 case, they're being sued under the DMCA... this law has two conflicting clauses. Our side quotes the clause that says it's OK to break the encryption for purposes of interoperability. Their side quotes the clause that says you can't distribute tools to break the encryption.
So, to resolve the 2600 case, a very important ambiguity in the DMCA will have to be cleared up.
More info -- from one of the deposed
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DeCSS Update
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· Score: 5
Hi. I'm Andrew Bunner... one of the named defendants in the DVD CCA case.
On June 6th, I'm due to give my deposition. Here's what's happened so far on this topic. We're right now in the "discovery" phase of the trial which means we have to give them stuff and they have to give us stuff.
I've been asked to provide copies of everything I've ever written or read about DeCSS or any other technology used to encrypt images. Huh. I guess they want my copy of PGP.
They're probably going to try to take my computer from me so they can comb through the hard drive at their leisure.
We're going to object to this course of action since my drive is full of nuclear secrets, FBI informants and the witness protection database. Not to mention the fact I do all my work from this box.
On the 6th, I'm heading down to Cupertino to meet with a bunch of the plaintiff's lawyers, a court recorder and a bunch of our lawyers. Then they're going to swear me in and ask me questions all day.
My lawyers tell me that is expressly prohibited for them to apply electrodes to my nipples during the questioning process.
Although I can't be sure, my guess is that their line of questioning is going to be aimed at showing that somehow I knew or should have known that DeCSS was a stolen trade-secret. Their case pretty much hinges on this.
This will be hard for them since they are trying to prove a falsehood.
I'll ask my lawyers if I'll be allowed to talk to the press about the deposition after it's done. If so, I may try a summary to/.
Anyhow... wish me luck!
(*) Note that the MPAA case depends on a much different section of law. The DVD CCA is suing me under California trade secret law. 2600 is being by the MPAA sued under the DMCA.
My company has a dedicated server through Digital Nation. Well, apparently, we inherited the IP address of a machine that USED TO BE an open relay. Never mind that we've been using a version of sendmail that doesn't permit open relays since the first day we turned the machine on.
And ORBS refused to take us off their list.
You can't call them up and reason with a human being. You're totally at the mercy of their anonymous maintainers. And they don't listen to you when you show them PROOF that your IP isn't an open relay. And they don't listen to your ISP when they show them PROOF that there is no open relay.
ORBS sucks. Their cure really is worse than the disease.
I used an exert from Bryan Pfaffenberger's (bp@virginia.edu) excellent article in the Linux Jounral about the DMCA. http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/016 .html
Here is the full text of my response. I hope that others will submit it as well with their own names at the bottom.
Dear Copyright Office,
I believe that the DMCA presents a real threat to the freedom of software developers and, ultimately, consumers. Software developers must always have the right to reverse engineer a technology for the purposes of interoperability. We should be allowed to contract away that right. The Congress should not be allowed to legislate away that right.
I have responses to the following specific questions...
1. What technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works exist today?
Copyrighted works that can be digitized are often protected by some form of proprietary encryption. This encryption has, so far, always been shown to be crackable.
2. Do different technological measures have different effects on the ability of users to make noninfringing uses? Can and should the Librarian take account of those different effects in determining whether to exempt any classes of works from the anticircumvention provisions of section 1201? If so, how? In determining what constitutes a class of works?
Proprietary encryption technologies and closed data file formats have a negative impact on the consumers ability to make noninfringing uses of ALL WORKS they have purchased. It must always be legal to create, distribute and use technology that frees the consumer to make "fair use" of the copyrighted works they have purchased. That means that the consumer will be allowed to make copies of a work for private, non-commercial use as often as he or she likes. This is the principal of fair use as established in the Sony v. Beta Max case.
18. In what ways can technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works be circumvented? How widespread is such circumvention?
Encryption is often used to control access to a copyrighted work. In general, this doesn't do what the copyright holder wants. If an encrypted work can be viewed that means it can be decrypted. If it can be decrypted, it can be copied. Here are several examples that apply to audio/visual data that can be played on a computer...
* One could write a video driver for a personal computer that, in addition to displaying images to the screen, copies the images being displayed to the computer's hard disk. In this way, one could make digital copies of a DVD.
* Many modern sound cards provide a digital output jack. Any encrypted music that is played on such a machine is decrypted and sent to both the computer's speakers and the digital output jack. This output jack can easily be connected to a digital recording device such as a MiniDisc recorder, a CD burner or a Digital Audio Tape recorder.
I can think of no form of encryption that has not yet been cracked.
19. Has such circumvention (or the likelihood of circumvention) had any impact on the price of copyrighted works? Please explain.
I don't believe so. Pricing on music CDs have been more or less consistent with inflation. By and large, consumers would rather own the "real" media than a pirated copy. A music CD comes with pretty cover art, lyrics, etc. and the knowledge that the consumer is contributing the band's success. The same argument can be made with DVDs. In addition, it's cheaper and faster to visit a store and buy a DVD than it is to spend 100+ hours downloading a pirated copy of questionable quality.
25. Has the use of technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works resulted in making copyrighted works more widely available? Please explain.
No. Controlling access to copyrighted works makes the works less widely available because it requires that the digital consumer purchase a specially equipped viewer/player with proprietary decryption technology built in.
28. What other comments, if any, do you have?
I would like to reference the MPAA cases going on in New York and Connecticut. In these cases, the MPAA is attempting to make it a criminal act to distribute a "unapproved" Linux DVD player. If the DMCA is interpreted in a way that sides with the MPAA, consumers, software developers and free speech will all suffer a massive set back.
To illustrate the potential problem with the DMCA, The Linux Journal has concocted the following examples of legitimate, fair uses of copyrighted material that would be criminalized under the DMCA...
* A software publisher embeds in its copy-protected code a measure designed to interfere with the operation, on the same computer, of a competitor's products. If the adversely affected competitor includes code in its product that defeats the access-control mechanism to defeat this destructive activity, the competitor will have violated the DMCA--and since the underlying purpose is commercial gain, the federal fines or imprisonment penalties apply.
* A professor wishes to excerpt a portion of a protected work for the purposes of critical commentary in her classroom. She defeats the work's access-control mechanism so that she can excerpt this section. Even though this action is defensible under the fair use provisions of long-standing copyright law, it is an offense under the DMCA. If all available information were to be eventually digitized and protected by access-control mechanisms, teachers will be unable to share information in the classroom unless they pay fees to copyright holders.
* A popular music utility is found to collect extensive information regarding the user's listening habits, and uploads this information surreptitiously to a marketing database. Because the utility does not associate this information directly with the user's name, it is protected against circumvention by the DMCA--and that's true even if, subsequently, this information can be linked to the user's actual name through the use of a serial-number matching program. Any attempt to circumvent this type of monitoring is a crime under the provisions of the DMCA.
* A popular, but access-protected, operating system is found to have gaping security holes, which can be repaired only by defeating the access-control mechanism. A group of security experts creates and disseminates via the Internet a utility that defeats the access control mechanism so that users everywhere can protect themselves. Although the DMCA gives individual owners the right to circumvent the mechanism, any attempt by such owners to develop and distribute a circumvention utility would appear to be illegal under the provisions of the DMCA [see Section 1201 (b), 1]. If such a utility were commercially distributed, the "infringers" would be subject to federal fines or imprisonment.
* To safeguard confidential information, a company develops an access-control mechanism that prevents unauthorized employees, or people outside the company, from gaining access to this information. However, an employee becomes convinced that the company is engaged in illegal activities. To blow the whistle on these activities, the employee shows an encrypted CD-ROM to a press reporter. They use an anti-circumvention utility to gain access to the potentially incriminating evidence. Learning of this incident, the company sues the employee and the reporter under the provisions of the DMCA, and wins.
These examples were taken from http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/016 .html. The point they illustrate is that the DMCA seriously infringes on the our freedoms.
We don't need additional laws to protect copyrighted works. It's already illegal to distribute a copyrighted work that you don't own or have license to distribute. There's no need for further legislation. Especially legislation that goes as far as the DMCA.
Sincerely,
Andrew Bunner 39361 Mozart Terrace #101 Fremont, CA 94538 bunner@massquantities.com
I was at Netscape in time to get a Zaroo Bugs t-shirt when we shipped 4.0. My brief life as a worker bee in a big software company taught me the following... every commercial software package ships with hundreds of bugs. More lines of code... more bugs.
Win2000 is a totally new code base. Of course it has tons of bugs. It's probably just as usable as Win98, though. (take that for what it's worth)
Lots of bugs are things like "dialog so-and-so not up to spec"... "menu items in wrong order"... "need new icon for blah"... "hard disk reformats on key-down event". Only a few of these are serious.
The goal is to not ship a product that can cause data loss. If you don't have any data-loss bugs and your feature check list is mostly done, a profit-motivated company will yell "ship it!" and sort the rest out later.
If Gnome developers and testers cataloged their bugs as rigorously and with as much gusto as Microsoft, we'd probably have seen thousands of open bugs in Gnome 1.0.
With all that said, I don't plan on installing W2K.
Now that I think about it, kimflournoy hits the nail on the head.
The straight crowd is generally more inhibited. We are lame.
Here's my personal take. If I'm wearing black leather pants and a ridiculously tight muscle shirt, I already look silly. I may as well go the whole nine yards and get my groove on.
Breeder boys, unite!
[james-brown-voice]Get up off at thang and dance 'till you fell better![/james-brown-voice]
We've got a vestigal rave scene. Very few places get to do the full-blown 10pm to 6am thing. Click here for a calendar of SF raves.
I'm not much of a smoker, but when you ban smoking, you also ban toking. To have a really active club scene you need three things...
1) Electronica till sun up 2) Lots of sexy people in outrageous outfits 3) Free flowing alcohol and available drugs
Some will disagree, but whatever's on your list, resident's are probably objecting to it.
A slightly off-topic rant... Why are all the gay clubs so much cooler than the straight clubs? Where's a hip breeder boy to go when the straight joints feel about as sterile as a cubicle maze?
Compare San Francisco's night life to Manhattan's. It's pathetic.
These New Money people move into the city so they can experience it's culture and then they kill it. Well, move the fuck out.
It's the young crowd that's largely responsible for giving a city its personality. If you take away the outlets for the hipsters, they're going to stop moving in and start moving out. A San Francisco where every district feels like Pacific Heights is not a San Francisco people will be happy with.
The party crowd can vote, Willie. Take care of us.
I'm missing something. You can transmit data about a cobalt atom to another spot where there is no cobalt atom by using this eliptical coral. Sounds, neat. But...
Someone help me make the intellectual leap so that I understand how this can be used to help us build better circuits. Is the idea that we replace wires with really long, eliptical corals?
Oh to have moderator access today. I think I disagree with whatever slashdot-terminal was trying to express up there about Prozac.
Here's some personal experience that may be a bit more coheret than s-t's grammatical soup...
Stimulants in general let you focus and do more faster. They definitely increase productivity--in the short term. Unfortunately, it's a zero-sum game. If I take an ephedrine/caffeine/norephedrine cocktail and spend three-plus hours in hyper-hacker mode, when I come down, I'll spend another three hours or so in half-wit-hacker mode. Plus stimulants are addictive. Best to not rely on them.
GHB and GBL on the other hand... now these are some drugs that, from my experience, don't seem to have any down side. About 90 minutes before bed, if I take a dose of GBL (different acronym, same pysiological effect), I'll have a very enjoyable and startlingly productive coding session. Afterwhich time I'll have a pleasantly tired feeling and it's Bed Time for Bonzo.
I've never tried coding and stoning, but I sort of think that I'd do more harm than good with that experiment;-)
Do you agree that their real fear might be raw video from DVDs being modified and republished?
Nothing to do with it.
Their immediate goal is make sure the artificial barriers in the DVD market stay in place. i.e. Currently, you can't watch a U.S. DVD on a player that was built for the Japanese market. Jack Valenti and his band of merry movie execs divided the world into six regions. By releasing the same movie at different times to different regions, they can maximize profit and minimize pirating (so... Hong Kong gets movies last)
Their longer term goal is to tell you when and where you can watch your media by controlling every play back technology. They want to take away your right to format-shift your media. They want to undo fair use.
Jon... whatever you do, don't admit to any wrong-doing. If you allow them to bully you into signing something that isn't true, it could be serious blow to us here in the U.S.
There's already a floppy disk (sealed) with decss on it and a hard copy of the source (also sealed) in the court record.
Go to http://sharedlib.org for a list of mirrors (there's NO local copy) and download the css-auth or livid code for yourself. Put it up on a Geocities or Xoom page and then email me the URL.
Don't bother mirroring the Windows binary... get the source, that's what we care about.
And remember, "We're the MPAA's customers. Not their enememies" -- Chris Dibona
Pro-piracy statements get us no where. Neither do "fuck the lawyers" rhetoric.
Actually, the only word the judge spoke during the entire proceeding was "White".
One of Judge Elfving's good friends is Judge White (it's spelled differently, though). The lead counsel for the plaintif mis-pronounced it as "Judge Whit".
Elfving corrected him in what was a fairly awkward moment.
Slashdot Mirror
So I'm the "Bunner" in DVD CCA vs Bunner. If you could look in my out-box today, here's what you'd see:
Friends and family,
My fifteen minutes of fame are over. The DVD CCA is dropping their case against me. For those that don't remember, I was sued in late 1999 for posting the source code to a software DVD player on my web site. The plaintifs included Sony, MGM, Panasonic, Microsoft, Warner-Brothers, and most other corporations in either media or electronics.
Today, they gave up. They've withdrawn the case
without prejudice.
Reading between the lines that means that they finally realized they were going to lose and that even if they won, the "secrets" of playing a DVD have been pretty well documented for the public.
To celebrate the occassion, I've asked my lawyers to file a counter-suit alleging emotional anguish and seeking damages of one hundred billion trillion dollars.
-- Andrew
I've used JBuilder, JDeveloper, Together and taken a keen look at Java modules for Emacs... IntelliJ is miles ahead of these and by far the best IDE I've ever seen in my career.
Ctrl-Q puts the javadocs for method at the cursor in a little tool-tip pop-up
Alt-F7 finds all the callers of a method, implementors of an interface, descendants of a class, users of a class, reads of a variable or writes of a variable depending on the context and what you select.
Shift-F6 allows you to rename a variable, method or class and have ALL references to it throughout your entire project be updated.
The auto-complete feature is also the best I've seen. I start typing a variable name and then just hit Ctrl-Space and it will complete it for me, giving me a choice if there's more than one variable name with that prefix defined in the current scope. This works with methods and classes as well.
When I type a class name that hasn't been imported into the current file, IntelliJ underlines it in red and gives me the option to automatically add it to the imports by hitting Alt-Enter.
The "live templates" feature is incredible. I have mine set up so that when I type "log" and then hit tab, it prints...
getLog().debug("currentMethod: ")
...and puts the cursor just after the colon. The kicker is that it can figure out the current class and method and include it in my live template.
It's integrated with Ant and CVS. It's got a great debugger. It's lightning fast compared to the hog that is JBuilder.
If you program in Java, try this IDE. You will never go back.
I saw Down To Earth on Thursday at a Mountain View, CA theater ... the version of the film that I saw looked like it was cobbled together from the clips that landed on the editing room floor.
:)
In about 1/2 the scenes, you could see microphones dangling above the actors heads! Sometimes they were so obvious that I worried the actors were going to actually get hit by one of these dangling mics.
At first I thought it was intentional and that the microphone "gag" was going to be used somehow in the script... um, no. It was just a goof-up that lasted the entire movie.
My pet peeve.
Other than that, I enjoyed it
I doubt it. The tools they use to create the scenes will get more and more sophisticated. They might use fractal algorithms to generate super-fine detail in trees, landscapes, water, fog, etc. The point is, they won't be hand-placing every polygon--the same way you don't hand color-every pixel in any other form of computer art.
There will continue to be applications that push the limits of this and many subsequent 3D accelerators. Trust me.
Silicon Valley culture?? I've lived in Sunnyvale, Fremont and now San Francisco. The entire Penninsula from San Jose up towards Daly City is a cultural wasteland.
There's a lot of ethnicities mixed in and around that area, but they're all focused on making the big bucks.
Performing arts is limited to huge concerts at the Shoreline.
I haven't eaten at any restaurant in the Valley with decent food, service and ambiance with the exception of a few in downtown Palo Alto. And the restaurants in downtown Palo Alto are populated almost universally by status-/money-grubbing social climbers.
Most people work so hard and long they have little time to appreciate or contribute anything that I would call "culture". And when the dot-com'ers take a day off, they talk about work.
I work at a company called Woosh! and the only reason I tolerate Sunnyvale is because our CEO explicitly rejects the money-grubbers and those that are "cultural tofu". So we've got a spicy good mix at our office. That's the exception rather than the rule.
Now, if you don't mind, I need to go comute fourty miles. -Phbbt!-
All the filings relevant to my case are on http://www.eff.org. Press coverate was really good early on, but the California case has really been overshadowed by the 2600 case.
There's an article on my case on pg 96 of last month's Wired (the one with the cute asian chick on the cover).
The reason the 2600 case has gotten more coverage is because, frankly, it's more interesting. For the DVD CCA to sue people all over the world under California trade secret law is pretty ridiculous. Not only that, but they're completely in the wrong. The consensus within the community is and has always been that decss was not "illegally" reverse-engineered.
With the 2600 case, they're being sued under the DMCA... this law has two conflicting clauses. Our side quotes the clause that says it's OK to break the encryption for purposes of interoperability. Their side quotes the clause that says you can't distribute tools to break the encryption.
So, to resolve the 2600 case, a very important ambiguity in the DMCA will have to be cleared up.
Hi. I'm Andrew Bunner... one of the named defendants in the DVD CCA case.
/.
On June 6th, I'm due to give my deposition. Here's what's happened so far on this topic. We're right now in the "discovery" phase of the trial which means we have to give them stuff and they have to give us stuff.
I've been asked to provide copies of everything I've ever written or read about DeCSS or any other technology used to encrypt images. Huh. I guess they want my copy of PGP.
They're probably going to try to take my computer from me so they can comb through the hard drive at their leisure.
We're going to object to this course of action since my drive is full of nuclear secrets, FBI informants and the witness protection database. Not to mention the fact I do all my work from this box.
On the 6th, I'm heading down to Cupertino to meet with a bunch of the plaintiff's lawyers, a court recorder and a bunch of our lawyers. Then they're going to swear me in and ask me questions all day.
My lawyers tell me that is expressly prohibited for them to apply electrodes to my nipples during the questioning process.
Although I can't be sure, my guess is that their line of questioning is going to be aimed at showing that somehow I knew or should have known that DeCSS was a stolen trade-secret. Their case pretty much hinges on this.
This will be hard for them since they are trying to prove a falsehood.
I'll ask my lawyers if I'll be allowed to talk to the press about the deposition after it's done. If so, I may try a summary to
Anyhow... wish me luck!
(*) Note that the MPAA case depends on a much different section of law. The DVD CCA is suing me under California trade secret law. 2600 is being by the MPAA sued under the DMCA.
I've been a victim of their net-terrorism.
My company has a dedicated server through Digital Nation. Well, apparently, we inherited the IP address of a machine that USED TO BE an open relay. Never mind that we've been using a version of sendmail that doesn't permit open relays since the first day we turned the machine on.
And ORBS refused to take us off their list.
You can't call them up and reason with a human being. You're totally at the mercy of their anonymous maintainers. And they don't listen to you when you show them PROOF that your IP isn't an open relay. And they don't listen to your ISP when they show them PROOF that there is no open relay.
ORBS sucks. Their cure really is worse than the disease.
I used an exert from Bryan Pfaffenberger's (bp@virginia.edu) excellent article in the Linux Jounral about the DMCA. http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/016 .html
6 .html. The point they illustrate is that the DMCA seriously infringes on the our freedoms.
Here is the full text of my response. I hope that others will submit it as well with their own names at the bottom.
Dear Copyright Office,
I believe that the DMCA presents a real threat to the freedom of software developers and, ultimately, consumers. Software developers must always have the right to reverse engineer a technology for the purposes of interoperability. We should be allowed to contract away that right. The Congress should not be allowed to legislate away that right.
I have responses to the following specific questions...
1. What technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works exist today?
Copyrighted works that can be digitized are often protected by some form of proprietary encryption. This encryption has, so far, always been shown to be crackable.
2. Do different technological measures have different effects on the ability of users to make noninfringing uses? Can and should the Librarian take account of those different effects in determining whether to exempt any classes of works from the anticircumvention provisions of section 1201? If so, how? In determining what constitutes a class of works?
Proprietary encryption technologies and closed data file formats have a negative impact on the consumers ability to make noninfringing uses of ALL WORKS they have purchased. It must always be legal to create, distribute and use technology that frees the consumer to make "fair use" of the copyrighted works they have purchased. That means that the consumer will be allowed to make copies of a work for private, non-commercial use as often as he or she likes. This is the principal of fair use as established in the Sony v. Beta Max case.
18. In what ways can technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works be circumvented? How widespread is such circumvention?
Encryption is often used to control access to a copyrighted work. In general, this doesn't do what the copyright holder wants. If an encrypted work can be viewed that means it can be decrypted. If it can be decrypted, it can be copied. Here are several examples that apply to audio/visual data that can be played on a computer...
* One could write a video driver for a personal computer that, in addition to displaying images to the screen, copies the images being displayed to the computer's hard disk. In this way, one could make digital copies of a DVD.
* Many modern sound cards provide a digital output jack. Any encrypted music that is played on such a machine is decrypted and sent to both the computer's speakers and the digital output jack. This output jack can easily be connected to a digital recording device such as a MiniDisc recorder, a CD burner or a Digital Audio Tape recorder.
I can think of no form of encryption that has not yet been cracked.
19. Has such circumvention (or the likelihood of circumvention) had any impact on the price of copyrighted works? Please explain.
I don't believe so. Pricing on music CDs have been more or less consistent with inflation. By and large, consumers would rather own the "real" media than a pirated copy. A music CD comes with pretty cover art, lyrics, etc. and the knowledge that the consumer is contributing the band's success. The same argument can be made with DVDs. In addition, it's cheaper and faster to visit a store and buy a DVD than it is to spend 100+ hours downloading a pirated copy of questionable quality.
25. Has the use of technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works resulted in making copyrighted works more widely available? Please explain.
No. Controlling access to copyrighted works makes the works less widely available because it requires that the digital consumer purchase a specially equipped viewer/player with proprietary decryption technology built in.
28. What other comments, if any, do you have?
I would like to reference the MPAA cases going on in New York and Connecticut. In these cases, the MPAA is attempting to make it a criminal act to distribute a "unapproved" Linux DVD player. If the DMCA is interpreted in a way that sides with the MPAA, consumers, software developers and free speech will all suffer a massive set back.
To illustrate the potential problem with the DMCA, The Linux Journal has concocted the following examples of legitimate, fair uses of copyrighted material that would be criminalized under the DMCA...
* A software publisher embeds in its copy-protected code a measure designed to interfere with the operation, on the same computer, of a competitor's products. If the adversely affected competitor includes code in its product that defeats the access-control mechanism to defeat this destructive activity, the competitor will have violated the DMCA--and since the underlying purpose is commercial gain, the federal fines or imprisonment penalties apply.
* A professor wishes to excerpt a portion of a protected work for the purposes of critical commentary in her classroom. She defeats the work's access-control mechanism so that she can excerpt this section. Even though this action is defensible under the fair use provisions of long-standing copyright law, it is an offense under the DMCA. If all available information were to be eventually digitized and protected by access-control mechanisms, teachers will be unable to share information in the classroom unless they pay fees to copyright holders.
* A popular music utility is found to collect extensive information regarding the user's listening habits, and uploads this information surreptitiously to a marketing database. Because the utility does not associate this information directly with the user's name, it is protected against circumvention by the DMCA--and that's true even if, subsequently, this information can be linked to the user's actual name through the use of a serial-number matching program. Any attempt to circumvent this type of monitoring is a crime under the provisions of the DMCA.
* A popular, but access-protected, operating system is found to have gaping security holes, which can be repaired only by defeating the access-control mechanism. A group of security experts creates and disseminates via the Internet a utility that defeats the access control mechanism so that users everywhere can protect themselves. Although the DMCA gives individual owners the right to circumvent the mechanism, any attempt by such owners to develop and distribute a circumvention utility would appear to be illegal under the provisions of the DMCA [see Section 1201 (b), 1]. If such a utility were commercially distributed, the "infringers" would be subject to federal fines or imprisonment.
* To safeguard confidential information, a company develops an access-control mechanism that prevents unauthorized employees, or people outside the company, from gaining access to this information. However, an employee becomes convinced that the company is engaged in illegal activities. To blow the whistle on these activities, the employee shows an encrypted CD-ROM to a press reporter. They use an anti-circumvention utility to gain access to the potentially incriminating evidence. Learning of this incident, the company sues the employee and the reporter under the provisions of the DMCA, and wins.
These examples were taken from http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/01
We don't need additional laws to protect copyrighted works. It's already illegal to distribute a copyrighted work that you don't own or have license to distribute. There's no need for further legislation. Especially legislation that goes as far as the DMCA.
Sincerely,
Andrew Bunner
39361 Mozart Terrace #101
Fremont, CA 94538
bunner@massquantities.com
Watching a DVD on an unapproved Linux player is like...
A) Stealing the keys to a department store
B) Sneaking into a movie theater without paying
C) Car jacking
D) Murder
I was at Netscape in time to get a Zaroo Bugs t-shirt when we shipped 4.0. My brief life as a worker bee in a big software company taught me the following... every commercial software package ships with hundreds of bugs. More lines of code... more bugs.
Win2000 is a totally new code base. Of course it has tons of bugs. It's probably just as usable as Win98, though. (take that for what it's worth)
Lots of bugs are things like "dialog so-and-so not up to spec"... "menu items in wrong order"... "need new icon for blah"... "hard disk reformats on key-down event". Only a few of these are serious.
The goal is to not ship a product that can cause data loss. If you don't have any data-loss bugs and your feature check list is mostly done, a profit-motivated company will yell "ship it!" and sort the rest out later.
If Gnome developers and testers cataloged their bugs as rigorously and with as much gusto as Microsoft, we'd probably have seen thousands of open bugs in Gnome 1.0.
With all that said, I don't plan on installing W2K.
Sorry for fucking up your lyrics, Mr. Brown. I guess that's what the proofread button is for :-)
Now that I think about it, kimflournoy hits the nail on the head.
The straight crowd is generally more inhibited. We are lame.
Here's my personal take. If I'm wearing black leather pants and a ridiculously tight muscle shirt, I already look silly. I may as well go the whole nine yards and get my groove on.
Breeder boys, unite!
[james-brown-voice]Get up off at thang and dance 'till you fell better![/james-brown-voice]
Join the SFLNC.
Their agenda: Save what's left of San Francisco culture before yuppie dot-commers beat the life out of every remaining late night venue.
We've got a vestigal rave scene. Very few places get to do the full-blown 10pm to 6am thing. Click here for a calendar of SF raves.
I'm not much of a smoker, but when you ban smoking, you also ban toking. To have a really active club scene you need three things...
1) Electronica till sun up
2) Lots of sexy people in outrageous outfits
3) Free flowing alcohol and available drugs
Some will disagree, but whatever's on your list, resident's are probably objecting to it.
A slightly off-topic rant... Why are all the gay clubs so much cooler than the straight clubs? Where's a hip breeder boy to go when the straight joints feel about as sterile as a cubicle maze?
Compare San Francisco's night life to Manhattan's. It's pathetic.
These New Money people move into the city so they can experience it's culture and then they kill it. Well, move the fuck out.
It's the young crowd that's largely responsible for giving a city its personality. If you take away the outlets for the hipsters, they're going to stop moving in and start moving out. A San Francisco where every district feels like Pacific Heights is not a San Francisco people will be happy with.
The party crowd can vote, Willie. Take care of us.
I'm missing something. You can transmit data about a cobalt atom to another spot where there is no cobalt atom by using this eliptical coral. Sounds, neat. But...
Someone help me make the intellectual leap so that I understand how this can be used to help us build better circuits. Is the idea that we replace wires with really long, eliptical corals?
No. It means you'll get sued under the DMCA if you find some kludge to make it work.
-- Named Defendant #2, DVD CCA vs Most Of The Internet
Oh to have moderator access today. I think I disagree with whatever slashdot-terminal was trying to express up there about Prozac.
;-)
Here's some personal experience that may be a bit more coheret than s-t's grammatical soup...
Stimulants in general let you focus and do more faster. They definitely increase productivity--in the short term. Unfortunately, it's a zero-sum game. If I take an ephedrine/caffeine/norephedrine cocktail and spend three-plus hours in hyper-hacker mode, when I come down, I'll spend another three hours or so in half-wit-hacker mode. Plus stimulants are addictive. Best to not rely on them.
GHB and GBL on the other hand... now these are some drugs that, from my experience, don't seem to have any down side. About 90 minutes before bed, if I take a dose of GBL (different acronym, same pysiological effect), I'll have a very enjoyable and startlingly productive coding session. Afterwhich time I'll have a pleasantly tired feeling and it's Bed Time for Bonzo.
I've never tried coding and stoning, but I sort of think that I'd do more harm than good with that experiment
There are two protests going on in the San Francisco Bay Area tonight.
:-)
* 7pm at the Sony Metreon (the Mission and 4th entrance)
* 7pm at the Century Cinemas on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain View (outside the box office)
Bring posters, signs, flyers and (of course) the t-shirt
See you there!
-- Kinesis, Defendant #2
Do you agree that their real fear might be raw video from DVDs being modified and republished?
Nothing to do with it.
Their immediate goal is make sure the artificial barriers in the DVD market stay in place. i.e. Currently, you can't watch a U.S. DVD on a player that was built for the Japanese market. Jack Valenti and his band of merry movie execs divided the world into six regions. By releasing the same movie at different times to different regions, they can maximize profit and minimize pirating (so... Hong Kong gets movies last)
Their longer term goal is to tell you when and where you can watch your media by controlling every play back technology. They want to take away your right to format-shift your media. They want to undo fair use.
Jon... whatever you do, don't admit to any wrong-doing. If you allow them to bully you into signing something that isn't true, it could be serious blow to us here in the U.S.
-- Kinesis, Defendant #2 in the DVD CCA case.
Defendant #2 here... Yes, this hearing really is about to happen.
They'll probably move to have them sealed.
There's already a floppy disk (sealed) with decss on it and a hard copy of the source (also sealed) in the court record.
Go to http://sharedlib.org for a list of mirrors (there's NO local copy) and download the css-auth or livid code for yourself. Put it up on a Geocities or Xoom page and then email me the URL.
Don't bother mirroring the Windows binary... get the source, that's what we care about.
And remember, "We're the MPAA's customers. Not their enememies" -- Chris Dibona
Pro-piracy statements get us no where. Neither do "fuck the lawyers" rhetoric.
Actually, the only word the judge spoke during the entire proceeding was "White".
One of Judge Elfving's good friends is Judge White (it's spelled differently, though). The lead counsel for the plaintif mis-pronounced it as "Judge Whit".
Elfving corrected him in what was a fairly awkward moment.
PS - That was hilarious! Thanks.
When Kessler (counsel for the plaintiffs) started reading the comments at the last hearing it was all we could do to keep from laughing.
"Your honor, we have evidence here that an 'Anonymous Coward' called us 'cocksuckers' on slashdot."
I was reminded of a time when my little sister ran to my mother and said, "Andy called me a poo-poo head!"
Kessler read (from the record) for about an hour and a half in a ferocious speech that left most of us wondering why he had bothered.
-- Defendant #2